perl question
 

I know how to get rid of a white space at the end of the string: that's either chop or chomp

but how do you get rid of a white space at the beginning of a string?

chomp by default removes new lines from the end of the string.
anyway this is what you're looking for:

$x =~ s/^\s+//g; for beginning
$x =~ s/\s+$//g; for ending.

thanks----